While Americans were preparing to ring in the new year, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Federal Emergency Management Agency Chief Karen Evans were firing dozens of disaster response workers. The employees who lost their jobs on New Year’s Eve weren’t bureaucrats shuffling papers in Washington—they were members of FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery teams who deploy when hurricanes flatten communities, when floods trap families in their homes, and when wildfires consume entire towns.

This wasn’t a budget decision. This was sabotage.

I spent years at FEMA and working disaster response, and I know what it takes to save lives when disaster strikes. You need trained personnel who can mobilize immediately; who know how to coordinate search and rescue operations; who understand the complex logistics of getting food, water, and shelter to people who’ve lost everything. You can’t save lives and rebuild communities while gutting FEMA’s workforce and keeping the agency under incompetent and overtly political control. These New Year’s Eve firings guarantee that when the next disaster hits, Americans may very well pay the price with their lives.

The timing tells you everything about this administration’s priorities. FEMA’s workforce has already been traumatized by DOGE, endured a revolving door of unqualified political leadership, witnessed retaliation against staffers who speak out, and heard President Donald Trump himself threaten to destroy the agency. Most recently, senior FEMA leaders were tasked with an agency-wide “workforce capacity planning exercise,” with the stated goal of cutting 50% of FEMA’s workforce (a target the administration claims was included in error). Now they’re watching their colleagues get fired on a holiday while the nation faces a looming crisis.

Every day that FEMA remains under Noem’s control, every firing of trained disaster workers, every delayed disaster declaration brings us closer to a preventable catastrophe.

Nearly 200 FEMA employees warned that this combination of political obstruction and resource depletion risks another Katrina-level catastrophe. They’re not exaggerating. I fear that we’re on a course to painfully relearn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. Those who watched that disaster unravel in real time remember that it was a bad time for emergency management. FEMA was underfunded, it wasn’t a respected agency, and we saw the result: a bungled response to a major disaster that failed Americans........

© Common Dreams